


feast

by aerynlallaboso



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: (except not really), Gen, Rat-Eating, minor emeto warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-30
Updated: 2016-07-30
Packaged: 2018-07-27 16:44:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7626235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aerynlallaboso/pseuds/aerynlallaboso
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are rats in the gutters of Dunwall, and Emily Kaldwin can smell them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	feast

**Author's Note:**

> dishonored 2: the family that eats rats together stays together
> 
> i have no idea when this is set exactly... also no idea how i've managed to write so much in the past couple of days. enjoy (and heed the tag warnings)

There are rats in the gutters of Dunwall, and Emily Kaldwin can smell them.

She has always been able to, if she thinks about it. She was born in Dunwall Tower, where the few mice she saw were chased off by servants and mice aren’t really rats, anyway. Rats have sharper teeth and shriller voices and smell fat with blood. Rats carried the plague, when she was ten years old. Rats ate her mother in her dreams and nibbled her father’s toes while he sat in the filth of Coldridge Prison and thought of her in the Golden Cat, which was also infested with rats. That was where she learnt to tell them apart from mice, and a great many other things besides.

Individually, Emily does not fear rats. A single rat can be skewered and roasted for an adequate meal, although Callista shushed her hurriedly when she thought to mention this to the royal chef when she was young. She was only thinking of the night she sat on the shore of the Wrenhaven and ate skewered rat with Samuel and swapped stories of water-bound monsters.

Individually, rats are not terrifying. In Dunwall, rats do not live individually. They run in the gutters and sewers in thick, living streams, shrieking a chittering warning to all passersby. They carry disease that the two most brilliant men in all of Gristol barely managed to cure with divine aid; they consume scraps of food and scraps of bone marrow with equal hunger. A swarm of rats can strip a corpse quicker than a pod of hagfish. Emily has seen them do it.

Her father can raise a swirling hurricane of rats with a clenching of his fist, and while she cannot do the same, there are certain things that they-

She can smell the rats from her bedroom in the tower at night. It isn’t like when she was a child and detected them by their faint, wet scent from across the room - she smells them from miles away now, from the drains beneath the tower. She cannot hear them; if they had voices that called to her, it would be easier. Emily could deal with voices. Voices assault her ears from all directions every day as she sits on her throne, keeping court as its Empress.

Emily pulls her sheets tighter around her and tosses and turns until she falls into a dream of blood and silk and a rat perched atop her throne.

 

~

 

“Can you smell them?” she asks the Lord Protector, her father, in the morning. It is before dawn. Her eyelids droop; her hands curl around a cup of imported Serkonan coffee that he introduced to her on her sixteenth birthday. Her fingernails scrape over the cup’s porcelain sides, and she experiences the unsettling sensation that they are moving without her consent, searching for grey fur to pinch through. “The rats, I mean.”

“It’s hard not to.”

Emily’s fingertips twitch. “Not like that, Corvo. Not like - can you smell their blood? Can you smell their breath? Does it smell-”

Her father _hisses_. His left hand is clenching against his desk, so hard that the bandages he ties around it every morning are slipping with sweat and Emily can see the Mark on its back. Is it drawn with ink, she asked him when she was a girl. Can it come off?

She knows very well now that the Mark is drawn with whale-blood, and it never comes off.

“Yes,” Corvo says. “I can smell them.”

“Have you ever-”

He doesn’t want to tell her. She recognises immediately when her father is keeping secrets from her, the flicker that shudders through his eyes and purses his lips. She knows he knows that she knows, too, and that there is no point keeping it from her, so he says, “Twice.”

They sip their coffee. Emily places her left hand on the table, a slim mirror image to Corvo’s. “Why,” she says.

It’s rhetorical, but Corvo answers all the same. “Why don’t you ask him?”

 

~

 

She imagines she sees a rat sitting on the shoulder of the third noble to step forward and ask for her favour. She has been well-schooled in keeping horror off her face, but nobody questions her when she retires to her chambers earlier than usual and locks the door.

She stacks paper at the bottom of her door, so nothing can get through the cracks.

 

~

 

The Distillery District has rooftops that are slanted, but close together, and she has a clear path past every guard checkpoint. She wonders why she has never thought to come here before during her evening wanderings, besides the obvious threat of the gang presence in the area. Her father has some kind of hold over the Bottle Street Gang, or they would’ve been cleared out years ago, long after their cleansed elixir still stopped being useful as a distribution centre for the plague cure.

Emily creeps over the heads of the late Doctor Galvani’s household and turns left, skimming behind a tall billboard that cloaks her figure in darkness from the Watch below. The distillery is a short way further on; it is not her destination tonight. The boarded up houses near the waterfront are what brings her here. Demolition orders have been issued for them more than once, but they always seem to go missing before they can be carried out.

She makes a daring jump to a balcony on the third floor of the left-most house. The door is missing, probably part of the rotted pile of wood she saw in the street below. Beyond it, a mattress is tilted at an odd angle against the wall. A thin length of rope dangles from it. Nothing is attached.

The stairs creak with mild protest as Emily descends them. The second floor holds nothing of interest, just empty rooms and furniture turned dark with mildew and age. A fireplace is filled with likely ancient soot in the sitting room; her heart quickens when she sees something move in it. She pokes the coals with her foot, but no rat emerges, much to her relief.

The feeling fades when she gets to the ground floor and hears the humming, the whispering, her gaze drawn unwillingly to the door off the kitchen that leads, she discovers, outside, to an alley between this building and the next that is fenced off with driftwood and on an impossible slope. Whale oil lamps dot the path, which winds around and down and ends at an altar, swathed in purple and adorned with crystals the dusky grey of ash. Where Emily expects a rune, however, there is nothing.

Someone else has been here before her, she thinks. She likely knows who it was.

She approaches the altar cautiously anyway. Probably it should be marked, destroyed before the Overseers find it. She’s surprised they haven’t already, but then, someone has to be destroying those demolition orders. Purple light casts shadows on her cheekbones and her left hand - the colour reminds her of royalty, of divinity, of the bloated face of a sailor she once saw who had suffocated - _drowned_.

She can smell rats.

“A woman used to live here,” an unexpected voice says. “She was blind. She called them her little birdies.”

Emily is an Empress, not a frightened little girl who saw her mother murdered and lives in fear of dying the same way - _head cut off, chop chop!_  She does not tremble at the presence of the being who Marked her. “What happened to her?”

“What happens to all my Marked,” the Outsider says. “She died.” His words make no wind; he does not breathe when she speaks to him. She has only seen him do that when he speaks to Corvo, for effect. “Corvo burned up her youth, and she wasted away. Her birdies ate well that night.”

“Why can I smell them?”

He folds his arms.

“Is it some kind of sick joke you like to play?” Emily asks. Her cheeks are burning with fever, like she is about to faint. “Does it give you pleasure to see us struggling with hunger we can never satisfy? Do you like it when we succumb and end up on our knees in the street gorging ourselves on their lifeblood? Is it like - is that how you want to see us worship, in the _dirt_ with our mouths full of fresh  _rat meat_ -”

The Outsider leans forward. Emily stares at him, dizzy. “Your words, not mine,” he tells her, and vanishes.

Emily vomits onto his shrine.

 

~

 

Roasted rat has a peculiar taste, like the street has soaked into its very bones, sodden and filthy and damp even after the fire has burnt all the moisture from it. Emily took her time pulling the dry meat away from the thin wooden skewer with her mouth. Samuel laughed when she got a piece stuck between her two front teeth, then covered his face and said he shouldn’t be laughing at the future Empress.

“You’re always allowed to laugh at me,” Emily said then gravely, licking her skewer. “I permit it. Because you tell really interesting stories.”

Live rat would taste the same, only wet and soft, blood thrumming in its veins, its small heart ceasing to beat as Emily tears into it with her blunted teeth. Its intestines would slip down her throat like gummy worms. She might get fur stuck between her molars, on the back of her tongue; she might get indigestion from eating it raw and licking up every drop of its blood, but she wouldn’t _care_ -

She retches twice more on the way back to the tower. Hunger chases her every thought, circling round and round like rats have infested her very soul, and she fancies she can hear the Outsider laughing. He would never, and yet she can imagine it as if she has already seen it: a harsh sound that reverberates through her mind and makes the heavens shudder as the Empress of the Isles gives in to her cravings.

She fights the urge to scratch her Mark raw all the way home. No wonder her father has scars across his, thin and shallow and the shape of fingernails.

 

~

 

“How do you stand it?”

They sit at his desk again. Emily finds his chambers more comfortable than hers most of the time - “your mother was the same,” he says when she remarks on it. They are more lived in, the walls lined with books and reports and weapons close at hand in case an alarm should be raised. She avoids looking at the locked drawer of his bed-side table that she knows contains a rune and a whale oil lamp, swaddled in purple fabric.

“I take rat blood in my coffee,” Corvo says, deadpan.

“Father…”

The scent of a rat reaches her nostrils, scurrying somewhere in the tower’s gardens. She grimaces and takes a large gulp of coffee to wash it away. “Do you think that would help, though?”

He eyes her apprisingly. “I don’t know. I’d rather not try it, Emily. The Overseers would have you in chains in a blink if they found you butchering rats in the cellars, Empress or not.”

“I’m well aware.” She does not have to mention all the times suspicion has turned towards him, all the times the Overseers have come so very close to unlocking his secret drawer or tugging the bandages from his hand. The Outsider walks among us, and turns the ground to unsteady sand under our feet.

Corvo’s hand snakes forward and covers hers, palm to Mark, a comforting gesture. “It gets easier to ignore,” he says. Emily chooses to believe him.

 

~

 

A parade is held in the winter in honour of her twenty-sixth birthday. Emily the Wise, Emily the Benevolent, Emily the Just, the signs the people hold read - the ones held back by the Watch, of course. Emily hates that it is necessary to place barriers when herself and the ‘common folk’, while the most venomous vipers in her nest walk side by side with her by virtue of their wealth. They have no idea that almost every night she is out among the people that they care nothing about. She is outside their windows and in the shadows cast by their lanterns and crouched on their rooftops.

The tailored pants she is wearing for this occasion hug her thighs and have no pockets for hidden weapons, despite her requests. She is eminently thankful that Corvo, behind and to her right, has an entire arsenal on his person should it be required. There is the Mark on her left hand, of course, but she would be dead - literally or figuratively - the instant she raised it in public.

She takes long strides, and smiles to see the more sedentary nobles struggling to match her pace. The day is clear and cold. A sea breeze stirs on the horizon as they approach the turning point for the parade; Emily can smell salt, whale oil and- 

Something snaps under her foot. Emily stumbles. Corvo is at her side before she can take a breath, asking if she’s alright. She can’t hear him over the pounding of her heart, the whispering in her ears that belongs to nobody - the rat whose spine she has just crushed with her heel stares up at her with lifeless eyes.

Blood, she thinks. Blood and meat and the taste of filth-

When she looks up, she meets the gaze of somebody in the crowd held back by the Watch. A young man, not more than twenty, with the pallor of a corpse and onyx pits set in an angular face. He cants his head, and smiles.

_Screw you_ , Emily mouths at the Outsider. She allows Corvo to help her to her feet, and clean the rat blood off her shoe, their Marked hands brushing for a moment because she knows he feels it too. What might they both be doing right now if it were not for the crowd around them?

The black-eyed man is gone by the time Emily raises her smile to the people again. The parade continues. They pass through the richer areas of the city, re-approaching the tower, everything washed and scrubbed and freshly painted to disguise the truth that she knows so well-

There are rats in the gutters of Dunwall, and Emily Kaldwin can smell them.


End file.
